I’ve been using Proton VPN for a couple of months now, mainly for bypassing geo-restrictions. Recently I discovered that ControlD offers proxies to bypass these restrictions, while not consuming as much battery as Proton VPN does, which just drains the life out of my phone. Not to mention that while I’m using proton, my NextDNS configuration gets disabled, which I could replace with ControlD serving all my use cases of bypassing geo-blocking and blocking ads, trackers and such, which honestly Proton VPN is pretty garbage at.
So should I switch to ControlD or are there any caveats? I heard they had latency issues in the past and NextDNS was faster than them but is it still an issue? And are their blocklists comparable to NextDNS?
Control D is a Smart DNS service capable of bypassing geo-restrictions. However, it is important to note that, unlike a VPN, Control D does not change your IP address or provide additional benefits typically associated with VPN services.
Based on personal experience, the effectiveness of Control D in bypassing geo-restrictions was somewhat unreliable.
I’m not really looking for that stuff. I usually use VPN for Netflix and stuff to watch movies in other regions, or to use apps blocked in my regions, which so far it has been able to do so quite well. Of course nothing can replace a VPN, but as I can’t really use it 24/7 due to battery drain and it disabling NextDNS, ControlD seems more appealing unless there are caveats to it as you mentioned it not being as reliable as a VPN
If controlD works for you and you’re only concerned about accessing your geolocked stuff then go for it. A DNS service will use less battery power becuase it doesn’t have to do any encryption, or has access to simple hardware supported encryption.
If you’re worried about people watching what you’re looking up, then Proton VPN is encrypting your connection.
I can not say about paid controld account, but it looks like it can do things similar what nextdns can. And more. With fancy ui.
My experience with controld is using public controld-based dns, which enables ai services like chatgpt, Gemini, brave ai, all of them. But it do not enables access to some twitter or Instagram, which are also restricted, only ai related things. If some ai is restricted it usually takes less than hour to enable it asking support. Maybe they can enable anything, but there are reasons why they do not do it. I am not able to buy paid controld account to test it, controld refuses it.
As VPN for bypassing restrictions there is nothing better than shadowsocks similar protocols. Hiddify (or nekobox, sing-box, v2rayNG, anything) makes easy and fast proxy chains, even +1 toggle si any website sees you as warp+ client connecting from nearest Cloudflare data center. No need to turn off private dns in android. Basically using Proton to bypass censorship is a waste. Proton VPN itself is not bad, but outdated in terms of bypassing censorship.